Yesterday I got up and busied myself with feeding the cats and checking my email and reading the latest Holidailies entries. And then I woke up Richard and we swung by the bakery in town for coffee and pastries and he dropped me off at the church so I could get things set up for the recorder ensemble.

I’ve mentioned this group before in this journal. It’s a group of us, all with about the same level of skill and confidence in our own ability, still diving for the fingering chart every time a flat or sharp creeps into the music. With the legitimate group leader (my dad) out of the country for months on end, the rest of us decided we at least wanted to try to play together a few times, so as to keep it going until he got back. I got this yen to actually play during a service, and with Christmas coming I thought that “Carol of the Bells” would actually sound pretty good when played by a recorder ensemble.

The rest of the group didn’t share my enthusiasm, but I’d asked my dad to arrange the song in a key with as few sharps and flats as possible, and the two most difficult parts had two players each, so each pair set up a system where they would trade measures or phrases back and forth, and I and the other tenor player divvied up the tenor and bass parts. And by the time we’d figured out who was going to play which notes, the group decided that maybe we were ready to perform after all.

It wasn’t as fast as I might have liked it to be; “Carol of the Bells” really should be played at a quick tempo. But we sounded pretty good, and we had fun doing it – enough fun that I think they’ll be a little surer of themselves next time we give this a try. And at the very least I’ve kept the group alive a little longer until my dad is finally home from Germany and can take it back over himself.

By the time the service was over I could feel my energy ebbing away, but we’d decided we were going to get our tree that afternoon, and prior to that we needed to hang the lace panels on the windows in the bay window downstairs. So Richard drilled and pounded and screwed the rods into place while I threaded the panels onto the poles and tried to keep from falling asleep on the couch, and then we drove to the tree farm to pick out a tree.

We always get either a redwood or an incense cedar, so we know exactly where to go in the farm. For whatever reason, those two types aren’t as popular, so there’s a very small selection of them. Nevertheless, we found one we both loved – and in record time too.

This year’s tree is a cedar, which means that although it was a little more expensive, the branches are sturdier. Finally, a tree with a top that’s strong enough to hold up our star! For that reason alone I may push to get a cedar every year from now on.

We got the lights onto the tree, and put out all the other decorations, and Richard put all the rest of the lights up on the windows, but by the time that was all over I was pretty exhausted and we decided to do the rest the next day – today.

Today the reason for the exhaustion became clear. I woke up feeling slightly nauseous and when I got to work I discovered I wasn’t the only one. One of my coworkers was out sick; at least one more wasn’t feeling too good. Ah, the joy of the winter’s first 24-hour bug! I finally gave up and went home at lunchtime and curled up on the couch and took a nap.

It truly does seem to be only a 24-hour bug, since I’m feeling a lot better now. The power was out at Richard’s office so he ended up coming home early too. And since we were both home we managed to get a lot accomplished. We spent a few hours sitting at the breakfast nook table with piles of letters, cards, stamps, and our PDA’s as we addressed, signed, and stuffed all the remaining Christmas cards. And then we turned the lights on the tree and hung all the ornaments, making sure to hang the soft, nonbreakable ones near the bottom. It was a good thing too, since the instant an ornament was hung within paw reach Azzie went nuts, wrestling it into submission until he was finally distracted with something else.

There are a few cards remaining that are in need of addresses, and emails have been sent to procure that information, but other than those few, the only thing we have left to ‘do’ for the holiday is the baking. It’s kind of a heady feeling to realize just how far ahead we are this year. For once.

Our Christmas tree, complete with star – for the very first time!

Our house, with lights

The best thing about the Thank God It’s Over party is that anyone who took part in Nanowrimo is welcome to come, whether they made the 50,000 level or not. Last night, after we’d finished with the cards and the lights and everything else, we headed off to Sacramento, through the rain, to join the others in the area. One of the participants hosted the party, and very thoughtfully stuck a sign in the window so we’d recognize the place when we drove by.

There were stuffed lemurs swinging gently in a circle, hanging from a ceiling fan. There were marvelously spicy chicken enchiladas, baked Brie with slices of french bread, cookies, and pie. There were also far more bottles of sparkling cider than any party should ever have. We all brought a page from our novels, and a few of us read them out loud to the group. We talked about our experiences – our favorite techniques for procrastinating on the writing; whether or not we thought we’d ever finish what we started in November; whether we would do it again.

To get ready for this, of course, we had to provide that one page from our novels. And as I opened the document I realized that the last time I actually worked on mine was the 25th of November – the weekend before Thanksgiving. I’d managed to get almost to 35,000 words, and I suppose if I’d really tried I could have churned out the remaining 15,000. After all, two years ago when I did Nanowrimo the first time, I finished the word requirement by the end of the month (barely). Of course, by the time I choked out the final few words I was sick of the story, and well aware of how truly horrid the final product was. I sent in my document for the word count and the instant I got back the official response, I deleted every piece of it from my hard drive, and did my best to erase it forever.

This time around this has actually been a story I want to keep. I didn’t want to end up hating it so much by the end of the month that I would have no choice but to delete it. And by the time I finally stopped writing the story had become seriously flawed. My main character may have to drop in age up to 20 years. The main premise of the story started to splinter into at least three different scenarios, none of which worked with most of what I’d come up with so far. And for a novel based on a series of letters, I was having a rather difficult time with the fact that I couldn’t seem to write any more than the first one.

It was fun though – more fun this time around than the first. . I imagine that it will most likely be quite a while before I pick it up again and try to fix some of those problems I mentioned, or even give it a good preliminary editing. But I’m not really worried about that. Early in the month I decided that it wasn’t so important any more to finish. What was more important was to try to at least get started on this story that’s been lurking in my head for quite a long time. And now that it’s down on paper (or at the very least, in a file on my computer), maybe I’ll be able to get the next part done with a bit more ease.

It’s been foggy and slightly damp all week so far, and when I was driving home a night or two ago, there were patches of frost and low-laying fog on the ground. Okay, so it’s not snow, but it’s the closest to a white Christmas we get around here. I’ll take what I can get.

It actually started raining Thursday, and continued on and off on Friday. I listened to the weather reports a bit grimly as they insisted that the rain would continue through today, because Richard had declared today Hanging Day and if it was raining there was no way he was going to go hang out on the slippery roof just to put up lights.

I’d mapped out our morning and afternoon yesterday, figuring out just how we’d get everything accomplished, but when I woke up this morning and realized that the promised rain had not yet arrived, that schedule was thrown out the window, and as soon as we’d eaten breakfast, Richard commenced with the hanging of the lights. There were a few sprinkles here and there over the morning but nothing serious enough to deter him.

While he hung the lights outside, I addressed and signed and stuffed all the cards for the card exchange on Cyberkat (an email list for cat people like myself), and then wrapped up all the presents for my family in preparation for shipping them off to Seattle. This is because this Christmas instead of having everyone come to my parents’ house, we’re all flying up to Seattle to spend Christmas at my little sister’s house. And because I don’t want to deal with trying to bring all those presents with us, I made sure we had every single present purchased so we could ship them up to Seattle ahead of time and not have to worry about lugging them onto an overcrowded plane with us on Christmas Eve. This had the added benefit that we now are completely done with all of our Christmas shopping – not just for my family but for Richard’s family, and for our friends as well. I am still a little in awe of how organized we managed to be about it, but really, all the credit goes to the existence of online shopping. Amazon.com is my very best friend at holiday time, yes it is!

We ate lunch and watched little brown sparrows flit around on our newly planted trees in our backyard (never fear, there will be pictures one of these days when they’re all done with the planting and the laying of ground cover and so on), and then we headed out, first to CostCo to return a present which didn’t get to be a present after all because we got something far cooler instead, and then to the fabric store so I could pick out a button for The Sweater (a very cute little pale green dragon). I simultaneously sewed on the button and had an argument with two cats over which one of us was allowed to ‘play’ with the needle, the thread, and the button, and then we did a hasty gathering of names for the regular Christmas cards, and Richard worked on the yearly Christmas letter while I zipped off to mail all the presents. I was also supposed to pick up stamps for all the aforementioned addressed, signed, and stuffed cards, but I forgot. I guess I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon, after church and lunch and getting the tree, and addressing and signing and stuffing a bazillion more cards, and everything else we have planned.

So instead of pictures of our house all in lights (because it is raining and dark outside now and I am not willing to go get soggy just for photographs), or pictures of our yard (see excuse for that mentioned earlier), I will leave you with lesson number one in what not to do when pondering holiday decoration. Please, if you care at all about your neighbors’ sanity, stay far away from the inflatable decor. It can only lead to bad, bad things.

It’s done. It’s finally done. Okay, it’s not exactly done since I still must purchase and attach a button to the neck, but technically, the knitting part of it is over, so humor me while I do a little happy dance. Done, done, done.

I chased my nephew around the house last week when they came down for dinner just to make sure it wasn’t going to be too small, because that would have been just my luck. He’s going to be three this January so it’s not like he’s really going to care one bit about how disgustingly proud I am to have made this for him (and in fact if he’s anything like his older brother, he will open the package, look at the sweater, and then promptly discard is as ‘boring’), but that really isn’t important. What’s important is that it’s done, and with plenty of time to spare.

Oh, and yes, it *is* lying on the floor in this picture. I needed a flat surface that was light colored for the photo. Tangerine (the orange nose), Rosemary (the black nose), and Azzie were all being *so* helpful in the process.

For the past two years we’ve spent New Year’s Eve in the little theater in Davis, watching a play put on by the Davis Musical Theater Company, followed by mountains of mostly bland Chinese food. We suffer through the mostly bland Chinese food only because we know that after that is done, there will be pie and cheesecake to make up for it, and also because once the food has been consumed and we can truly eat no more, they bring out a live band and pass out hats and noisemakers and sparkling cider, and we all get out into the aisles and dance ourselves silly until we collapse in one of the theater chairs and finally drag ourselves home. And for the last two years it’s actually been a lot of fun.

This season, however, we’ve been a bit hesitant about spending yet another New Year’s Eve with the DMTC. This is because the offerings so far this season have been more than a bit disappointing. In fact, when it came time for intermission during Music Man, we all decided that we couldn’t really handle any more of the lackluster performance, and so we snuck out and went to Bakers Square for pie a lot earlier than we usually do. Of the three plays we’ve seen this season, only one of them showed any promise at all – and that was the one we saw this past weekend. They did a fairly good job with Fiddler on the Roof (and I have almost managed to exorcise “If I Were a Rich Man” from my head, three days later), but one out of three isn’t the best of odds.

So…this year we decided to live it up a little bit and we’re going to do a fancy schmancy dinner that night, followed by fireworks in Sacramento (if the rumors are true), and then we’ll head home before things get too crazy and probably end up toasting in the New Year with sparkling cider while we watch the stupid ball drop on the TV.

And now that I think about it, this year it just may be time to resurrect that old family tradition of a blowout ice cream feast. Since my family doesn’t drink, and there were always a few metric tons of cookies leftover from Christmas, we replaced the usual ‘drink til you can’t stand straight’ tradition for New Year’s Eve with an all out dessert feast, buying any kind of ice cream and toppings we wanted, and then doing our best to suck down as much ice cream and cookies as we could stand. It was a marvelous tradition, and really, the only difference between that and getting drunk is that – while we probably all take in the same number of calories, our tradition never gave anyone a hangover the next day.

So I’m thinking that this year, after dining in style at one of the nicest restaurants in Sacramento, and after wandering Old Sacramento and oohing and aahing over holiday decorations and fireworks, we may just have to swing by the store on the way home and stock up a few pints of all our favorites. I’ll drag out all the leftover cookies and fudge and any other goodies that might still be lingering, and then we can toast in the New Year with all the sugar and calories at our disposal and it’ll be just like old times. Auld lang syne, and all that.

For the past few days I’ve come home from work and immediately gone into the back yard to stumble around in the dark and see if maybe, just maybe, anything had changed. This evening I finally got lucky.

Scattered around the perimeter of the yard, in the freshly de-weeded areas beyond the paths, are dozens of pots holding a vast assortment of green things. There are trees and there are bushes and there are little shrubby things that are quite possibly rosemary or even day lilies. It’s almost impossible to make them out in the dark, what with them all having dark colored bark and sitting in dark colored pots, but occasionally a silhouette would appear against the night sky and I could do my best to imagine what it might be. The two tall evergreen things are most likely the coastal redwoods, and there was just enough light for me to make out the little tag on the one lone tree sitting in the middle of the path, away from all the others. My little white peach tree, sitting there, looking so bare and fragile, soon to be planted with pomegranate and tangelo and walnut and apple and all the others.

By the end of the week we will be one whole heck of a lot closer to having our back yard complete. Granted, the worst of it isn’t over even with all the planting of trees and the spreading of bark that will be commencing shortly. After all there are two entire areas that must eventually be covered in paving stones, and another arbor to build or buy, and once those are done yet more shrubs and flowers and trees to plant. But this gets us a lot closer, and oh how anxious I am for morning to come so I can go out and see the new arrivals as more than just dark shadows in an evening shrouded patch of yard.

We have had rainstorms here before. There have been days since I started this job where we have stopped what we were doing to stare out the window as it pours from the sky in great sheets of water into the river below. But something about the rainstorm yesterday made me stop and stare more than usual.

It wasn’t the rain itself that caught my eye because it happened during one of the brief lulls that occurred throughout the day, amid the bouts of crazy rain. I happened to glance out my window at just the right angle and realized that I could actually see downtown Sacramento in the distance.

I can normally see the higher buildings, since after all our office is right on the Sacramento River, and we’re only a mile or two away from old town. But usually there is a little bit of a misty look to the view, as if the city is lurking behind some gossamer veil. But after the rain – that heavy rain that cleared the air completely – I could see the city clearly for the first time. All the buildings stood in stark contrast against the sky. I could see the cars as they sped down the highway across the river, far away. In the park that spans the distance between our office and downtown I could see No Parking signs. And closer still, across the river I could see that the bushes that line the banks were heavy with tiny red berries.

It usually doesn’t even occur to me to think that the air around Sacramento might not be the best of quality. I suppose after a while you just get used to the fact that you see everything through a bit of a haze. And so to see it so starkly defined against the leaden gray of the cloud-covered sky was shocking, and also a little unnerving. It was a clear reminder of just how bad the air can be. Oh, we’re nowhere near the thick and yellowish smog that coats Los Angeles like a layer of grease, but the air is not as clean as I have been apparently fooling myself it might be.

The rain continued on and off all afternoon. It was as if the clouds would pour out everything they had, all at once, and then scurry off to refill as quickly as possible before returning to repeat the process all over again. Later on, as the sun began to set and the rain was still falling, I glanced outside and noticed that the buildings of downtown Sacramento were only visible through that barely-there haze that I’m so used to. Only now it’s much more noticeable, now that I have that perfect, sharply lighted cityscape etched in my brain.

I think that, what with the holidays during the fall and winter, we should be given an extra day off of work this time of year. One extra day before Thanksgiving, and one extra day before Christmas (or whatever your winter holiday of choice might be) – and the sole purpose of those extra days is to stay home and bake. It can be anything at all. If you’re feeling particularly industrious, it could be a few different batches of bread – pumpkin and nut and banana and cinnamon swirl. If you’re the type who’s a bit intimidated by the whole concept of yeast and stirring, swing by the grocery store and pick up a few tubes of those ready-to-bake cookies. And if cooking really isn’t your thing at all, buy some pre-made cookies and a few tubes of icing, stay home, and have some happy decorating fun.

It’s always about this time of year that I start to get a little overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done. And I do this knowing full well that it’s no one’s fault but my own. The problem is that I want, very much, to have the time to do all the baking and decorating and homey sort of nesting that I want, but pesky things like work and choir practice and buying gifts and sending cards and paying bills tends to get in the way. I think that I just need a job where I can take about six weeks off, starting in mid November, and get it all out of my system and then come back the week after Christmas when it’s all over, feeling perky and refreshed and ready to get back to the business at hand.

The colder it gets the more I want to either dive into a mad frenzy of holiday baking, or else burrow underneath blankets with books and cats and freshly baked goodies from the previously mentioned baking frenzies. I avoid malls like the plague these days (and am inordinately proud of the fact that this year we were able to get all but a handful of presents online) but the slowly accumulating pile of packages that arrive in uneven intervals on our doorstep, the quick flashes of holiday music I catch on the radio before I quickly switch over to NPR, the smells of gingerbread and cider wafting out from scented candles and bakeries everywhere I turn, and the glimpses of decorations that are slowly making their way up in stores downtown, drag me, quite willingly, into the holiday spirit. I can’t help it, after all. It’s insidious, this holiday mood. This is the time of year colored with some of my favorite things – pine trees and cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, apples and chocolate. Any long ride alone in my car, where the only tape I ever seem to have at hand is an old Amy Grant Christmas album, is enough to get me dreaming of trees and lights and mulling cider on the stove.

And most of all, it makes me long for days off to bake.

This entry is a collaboration for On Display. This month’s (okay, technically this was November’s) topic is “spice.”

We are all about the traditions in this house. And this year, even though we were headed out of town for Thanksgiving and all the preparation of food (two kinds of bread and green bean casserole) had already either been done, or the ingredients purchased and sitting on the counter or in the freezer, Richard still got to partake in one of the most time-honored traditions of beleaguered husbands everywhere come Thanksgiving morning. He was sent to the store.

Of course, in this case, we sort of had to deviate a teensy bit from tradition, because the reason he was sent to the store is that he was closer to being dressed than I was, and as I put it to him, either he went to the store to get a new box of Swiffer wet pads, or else we would ‘get’ to mop the entire dining room and kitchen floor on our hands and knees with sponges and rags instead.

And this, of course, is because as I was putting together the green bean casserole Thursday morning in preparation for our trek down the freeways (along with several million other food-bearing people) to my in-laws’ place for Thanksgiving, I opened the cupboard door under the kitchen sink to throw something away, and discovered that the trash bag was crawling with ants. As I followed the trail, yelping my disgust, I discovered that they had come from across the kitchen, up the side of the door jamb into the dining room, and after I dove for the bug spray and we were wiping up ants and residual Raid off the kitchen linoleum, Richard discovered a secondary trail into the dining room. Once the first wave of ants was wiped up and I had dragged out the vacuum to suck up all their little dead bodies, I discovered that there were a lot more ants all over the dining room floor and table, randomly scattered here and there. And at that point I realized that we if we did not do *something*, we were going to be coming back home to a house that would be crawling with the nasty little critters. So off he went to the store.

Aside from the ants, however, it really was a marvelous Thanksgiving. Since my dad’s in Germany for an assignment, my mom volunteered to be on-call over the holiday (since she is a hospital chaplain) and was going to be all alone on Thanksgiving Day – a state, she assured us, she was perfectly comfortable with. So she wouldn’t miss out on the whole family gathering thing completely, we had her over to dinner Wednesday night and invited my older sister and her family as well. It was supposed to be a surprise but they hit far more traffic than expected coming down so Mom figured it out before they arrived.

It might as well have been a Thanksgiving feast all on its own from the amount of food. Richard grilled Cornish game hens (split in twos) on the grill with a rosemary rub, and I made the sweet potato and garlic thing that I adore. There was a vat of wild rice and a huge pile of steamed green beans with roasted garlic on top, cranberry sauce, cider mulling on the stove and pumpkin bread freshly baked that afternoon, and gingerbread with whipped cream for dessert. I had to dash out for about 45 minutes in the middle of the festivities because I volunteered to be the accompanist at the Thanksgiving Eve service (which necessitated some rather frantic practicing of the hymns since I didn’t actually find out what I was supposed to *play* til Tuesday night), but it all worked out. And the most Thanksgiving-y part of the whole meal was the fact that we ended up cooking enough for twice as many people and so despite my best efforts the fridge is full of leftovers. Well, all except for the gingerbread, which served quite nicely as Thanksgiving breakfast for Richard and I the next morning.

Thanksgiving at Richard’s parents’ house was a low-key and entertaining affair. There was, naturally, much stuffing of food into our faces, and passing of heaping plates of all manner of good things, and then that was all followed by a rousing rendition of “I’m Henry the 8th, I Am!” at the top of our lungs (No, I have no idea why either except that it was spontaneous and noisy and fun), and then there was pumpkin cheesecake which was just enough to send most of us into a blissful food-induced coma. And in case any of us had had the nerve to recover from all of the eating on Thursday, today included a huge breakfast with chocolate chip waffles and freshly whipped cream, chicken-apple sausage omelets, and copious amounts of coffee to try to fend off the overeating sleepies. We bought ornaments and found a slightly shy but mostly friendly orange cat to pet, and went to a a matineee showing of Elf, which was surprisingly much cuter (although just as predictable) than expected, and then that was all followed by a meal of all the leftovers from yesterday’s feast, and the final touch was even more coffee because after all of that food about the only thing any of us want to do is curl up somewhere and take a very long nap. Or at least curl up with the fire place on (now that we are home) and do something that requires absolutely no thought, and certainly no eating.

Although if more pumpkin cheesecake or gingerbread magically appeared right in front of me, forget I ever said anything about being full. It’s all about the traditions, after all.

I wish I could say that the reason I haven’t been writing is because I’m doing a lot of work on the novel, but that’s not really the case. I think it’s more to do with the fact that I’m feeling a bit guilty for not being further along on the novel than I should, and so avoid doing any kind of writing at all in some futile effort to make my brain focus on what it should be focusing on instead of what it wants to do.

I did have one particularly productive day this past week where I churned out about 7000 words in the space of only a few hours, but the rest of it’s come in dribs and drabs, and by this weekend I’d only managed to just break 30,000 words.

It’s been kind of a busy week, though, so it’s not as if I’ve had oodles of time to write. It seems lately like I have something scheduled every evening after work. Tuesday night I made two more batches of bread (this time it was nut bread) for the bazaar, and then Wednesday night was bible study, where we continued our trend of singing Veggie Tales songs every time a story crops up in the Old Testament chapters we’re reading that Big Idea has covered. We especially had fun making references to the Pie Wars, and how it is wrong to covet your neighbor’s rubber ducky (go rent King George and the Rubber Ducky if you’re completely lost here). Thursday night was choir practice, as usual, and I brought my oboe and had marvelous fun switching back and forth (in the same song) between playing and singing. Another tenor did show up but he hasn’t been back so it’s still just me. And Friday night I went over to a friend’s house, bringing with me all the flats of pomegranate jelly we made, and we ate an incredibly delicious chicken pot pie and then spent a few hours cutting out little squares of fabric and attaching the tags to the jars. I’d say we did a pretty good job because the bazaar (which I had to miss – sniffle) was yesterday and our jelly sold like crazy. We’re already all talking about how we’ll have to make even more next year, now that we know what we’re doing (well, sort of). We also worked on arranging a few songs for the food fight at church because this year the women’s and the men’s ensembles are the team leaders and so it’s our job to get up in front of the congregation and do our best to encourage them to bring lots and lots of food for the food bank in town.

Yesterday was a mostly non-writing day because I drove down to San Jose and met up with Richard’s sisters and mom and niece and his oldest sister’s matron-of-honor-to-be, and we all spent a few hours having fun at the Jessica McClintock store trying on bridesmaid dresses. I’d link to a picture but I can’t find one, and besides, the four of us all ended up choosing completely different styles (which was fine with the bride-to-be because all she wanted was for us to be in the same color and fabric), all of which are just gorgeous. Also I was faced with the fact that Richard’s niece somehow turned 16 without me catching on (because for whatever reason my brain insists that she has stayed eternally stuck at age 11), and has developed…um…womanly parts. I am not old enough to have a niece who has womanly parts, darn it.

Dresses ordered, we then consumed huge plates of Mongolian barbeque (in which I think I may have managed to consume my five required servings of veggies in one meal) and then I headed off to Napa (with a quick detour through Concord to go to the Trader Joe’s, which had the gall to actually be *out* of the cheese blintzes that were the sole reason for the side trip!) for my brother-in-law’s birthday. There was Chinese food in a restaurant with a huge fish tank which was far more exciting to my youngest nephew than anything on his plate, and there were presents, and angel food cake with sweet whipped cream (so very good!) and lots of chatter around the table, until Richard and I checked the time and realized that it was getting late so we headed home to be greeted by a horde of cats who had to wait a whole TWO HOURS past their dinner time to get fed (oh, the drama).

And that brings us to today, which has included a lot of music (oboe and voice) and a lot of laughing and chatting with new people, and then a few hours of napping because the last few days have worn me out. So I might be trailing further and further behind on this darn novel, but at least I’ve been having fun while not writing.